Complex systems made simple
Monday, February 18, 2013 - 07:00
in Biology & Nature
Just as the name implies, complex systems are difficult to tease apart. An organism's genome, a biochemical reaction, or even a social network all contain many interdependent components—and changing any one of them can have pervasive effects on all the others. In the case of a very large system, like the human genome, which contains 20,000 interconnected genes, it's impossible to monitor the whole system at once.